The Way Forward?

Published on 2016-01-29 in Tote.

A lot has happened in the recent time for the hobbyist community, and I’m currently wondering where I want to take this project. Here’s some random rambling on the subject, just to clear it out of my head.

  1. A Raspberry Pi Zero was released, and it’s small and cheap enough to fit in Tote and provide some more advanced features, like a Python interpreter and possibly w WiFi camera. I forked Tote Zero to explore that possibility, but it does makes things more complicated. An operating system, the need to shut it down cleanly, the need to keep it updated and properly configured, is a pain. Not to mention the booting time. Powering the Raspberry Pi is also much more involved than with Arduino – I have to use a 2S battery, which needs a professional charger with balancing.

  2. Batteries. While it’s easy to get a LiPo battery from an old cellphone or similar device, and there are lots of LiPo batteries available in shops for all those quadcopters, the technology is kinda tricky. They are not as safe as I would like, and you can damage them by over- discharging, so I need the voltage monitoring circuitry. Switching to standard NiCd or NiMH rechargeable AAA batteries seems like a good alternative. They are much heavier, but Tote can handle that. I will do some experiments in the near future.

  3. TV remote. This is the easiest and cheapest way to get remote control, so that’s why I used it, but now I’m beginning to have my doubts. It turns Tote into a toy and discourages tinkering. It also requires some work if you have a different remote than mine – you have to change all the key codes. And it’s not really that great for precise control. On the other hand, bluetooth and WiFi both have some great solutions.

  4. Sensors. This is another thing that keeps Tote in the remote- controlled toy category. It needs to have more sensors by default. I have already found switches for the feet, and probably will make that standard. Unfortunately the popular and cheap distance sensors out there all require 5V to work properly, and the 3.3V versions are much more expensive, so I think I can’t have them by default. Same for inertial sensors – a good module with proper filtering simply costs too much.

  5. Micropython. I’ve tried multiple times to make Tote programmable in Python, and all of them turned to be sub-optimal – either too expensive or too limiting. But there is a good chance that the ESP8266 port of Micropython will become much more usable, thanks to the Kickstarter campaign to fund its development. I’m still not sure there will be enough memory to handle everything I want, but it’s certainly very exciting for me. Since the ESP8266 only has about 9 usable GPIO pins on it, and I need to control 12 servos, I would probably still keep the Arduino and offload the leg inverse kinematics calculations to it. I’m torn between this and the Pi Zero.

  6. Force feedback and compliant motion. This is a very interesting topic, and it makes the robot much more interesting, but with the current design I simply don’t have enough analog pins, and their precision is also not so great. Thinking about adding some external ADC modules over I²C – they are not very expensive. Then I would need to decide whether to measure the servo position (easy, not that useful) or the force (hacky, hard, much more interesting).

  7. Community. Right now I know about about 4 people other than me that have built a robot more or less inspired by Tote. As far as I know they do not communicate with each other and do not share experiences or ideas. I suppose I could do a lot better in this area.

  8. Open MV. I should get it in a few weeks, and I’m definitely going to try and put it on Tote or any of my other robots. But it’s too expensive to be a default.